Articles
Articles and analyses from the INET community on the key economic questions of our time.
History of applied economics: now what?
There is a “tendency to neglect applied economics in writing the history of economic thought,” Roger Backhouse and Jeff Biddle remarked in 2000. They then followed the “applied” trail back into the XIXth and early XXth centuries, at a time the scope and nature of economics were debatted by continental and especially British political economists
I like IKE
Great Hospitality or Chance to Innovate?
Some personal touches to hospitality at the INET conference, although I feel for the people who have been holding that sign all day.
Kuhn vs Lakatos: it is not the institute of anything goes...
In his opening remarks, Robert Johnson said that this “is not the institute of anything goes” with INET now getting to a point where it needs to stop criticising the mainstream and should instead “create a new vision.”
Russia to the Rescue of Cyprus?
How Do We Get Out of This Mess?
That’s the question that Adair Turner, Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority, was addressing in his lecture to Cass Business School this week.
Economic “fields” as historical objects (not yet)
The notion of “field” is so pervasive that economists hardly pay conscious attention to it.
The Theory of the Firm: Language, Model and Reality
In a previous post we queried whether the theory of the consumer as developed in the first three chapters of Mas-Colell, Whinston and Green (and indeed other comparable texts) provides anything by way of content beyond what is implied by the abstract description of consumers as agents who are maximizing something. [We did not discuss chapter four, on aggregation of demand, to which we may return later]. As we noted then, a comparable point can be made about the theory of the firm.
Is The Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference Falsifiable?
MWG introduces the theory of consumer behavior by presenting two distinct approaches to modeling consumer behavior, the preference-based approach (based upon unobservable preferences generating a utility function) and the choice-based approach (based upon observable choice behavior), and attempting to establish connections between the two.
Welcome to Reading Mas-Colell!
QE3
Last Thursday, the Fed announced its anticipated third round of balance-sheet expansion, at a fixed rate of about $40B per month “until [substantial] improvement [in unemployment] is achieved in a context of price stability”.